Pre Production: Editing the Trailer

Editng trailer wasa difficult process with such limited video footage. However, having researched different Netflixtrailers, I found I genuinelely liked their style. One crucial part of this, however, is having the footage to produce this and this is something I would like to improve, so I am treating this as a trailer tester to see if the style works for our documentary and how I want it to look.  So far I have only been able to use footage from 'The Innovation of Justice' Shoot and also archive photos and videos. Whilst these are elements I will include in the actual trailer, I would want more interview and scene recreation footage to make it better branded to our film. The Editing Process behind this was fairly difficult but after brainstorming some ideas and researching into other trailers form Netflix I found a style I liked and a lot of that style came mostly from the edit, the choice of footage and audio and editing style.

My first step in actually editing the trailer was to work out how I would open it and what bold statement would capture peoples imaginations. I had organized all the footage into the appropriate filming system when ditching the footage at the Innovation of Justice Test Shoot. I wanted to do this to make life a lot easier for myself when it came to editing any of it and it was a requirement to keep ditching footage when the cameras were running all day. I split it up into the cameras (Panasonic one, Panasonic two and Canon 5D). From there I spit it up into the parts (part one and part two).

I scanned the footage to find any key quotes or lines to see what would look good in the trailer and what would work well and what wouldn't. The key line I wanted to open it with was a quote form Eddie: "They Killed Eddie Gilfoyle".  This is impactful and instantly makes the audience curious. Especially for social media this is a great bold, opemning line. "Feel free to include all your most heavy-handed dialogue in the opening 30 seconds. This clues the audience in to the movie's key themes and messages, and requires very little effort on their part. "(Lyne, 2018).

I wanted to make a dramatic transformaiton from Eddie now saying that to a picture of him when he was younger and in court facing trial. This puts even more drama to his opening line and visually show the audience that he is talking about himself. I had to zoom in a bti for a smoother transition so his head is the same sort of size in the now vs then. I had to create an adjustment layer and add a white box. Between the shots for a frame I would have the adjustment layer. THen to make this a smoother transition I brought the exposure up on the first video at the end and then the exposure up at the start of the new archive photo.

I then wanted to include a statistic to show the docuemntaries relivance and how current and topical it is. I eventually settled on a statistic "out of 1500 appeal cases, only 12 get through" which is one of the biggest statistics. The use of arcive for this trailer was fundimental in building up stories behind characters so we know what the documentary involves, and the bigger issues it is highlighting (diisclosure of evidence). I edited srcive footage to see how it would look visually when moving still images and highlighting words from articles. When enlarging words from articles, I found the image quality was lower which was annoying. Next time I will consider askign Eddie if he has any that his sister kept or anything; failing that go to an archive centre to look it up on one of their archive computers.

In Adobe Audition I imported the 'Boom' sound effect as I felt it was far too abrupt and stood out too much that it actually distracted from the trailer. Below is the boom sound before and after:

The 'Where Will You Stand?' element was inspried by the trailer for 'Making a Murderer'. At the end it also asks the same question and had Steven Avery standing up in court. I don;t have access to such footage for our priejct, but I lvoed the concept and wanted to recreate it. Luclkly, I was able to capture footage of everyone standing up at the Innovation of Justice' conference which was all the people who helped the event standing up.

References:

Lyne, C. (2018). Coming soon … how to make the perfect movie trailer. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jun/16/how-to-make-a-movie-trailer [Accessed 8 Dec. 2018].